So I further agree with your position. One doesn’t need any real data at all (accurate, or even “meaningful”) to draw a “conclusion”. People do this all the time. It’s called offering an opinion, or advancing a pre-determined agenda.

Of course, I was talking about whether you can apply this same logic/conclusion to global climate change and not just “long-term processes” in general. The answer I believe you’ve given to my actual question is: maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t.

As for not asking you “about politically-charged topics that I haven’t studied in detail”, you always had the option of saying “I don’t know”.

I assumed that when you said that “large-scale changes DO generally take more than a couple human lifetimes, not unlike in geology” [Comment 8] you meant that “generations of human observations ARE required to draw any meaningful conclusions” about natural events like global climate change [the subject of my question to you], rather than “in fact, I was stating that ‘generations of human observations are’ NOT ‘required to draw any meaningful conclusions’ in both biology and geology.”

I now understand that “large-scale changes DO generally take more than a couple human lifetimes, not unlike in geology” means that “’generations of human observations are’ NOT ‘required to draw any meaningful conclusions’ in both biology and geology.”

That’s all I asked. That’s all I wanted to know.
If anyone wants to read what I actually wrote about the way politics and hidden agendas shape the global warming debate, please have a look at http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2006/07/31/an-even-more-inconvenient-truth-the-myth-of-man-made-global-warming/ where lay out my assumptions and methodology in a straightforward way. You can decide for yourself whether what I’ve said makes any sense.

Either we can pin down a range enough to state that the Earth was colder by at least a degree since 1880, or we can’t say that. You can’t claim both.

You repeatedly ignore my point that less precise data is not the same thing as no data. The data from a century ago doesn’t have to be as precise as today’s to be able to draw conclusions from it. (Your quote also confuses accuracy and precision.)

As to prediction… being able to predict the total rainfall for a season does not require predicting exactly how much rain will fall on each day.

This is not a dodge – your original question was ill-posed; in fact, I was stating that “generations of human observations are” not “required to draw any meaningful conclusions” in both biology and geology… as I explicitly clarified in comment 11. And, with the caveats I’ve noted (such as that I’m not particularly well-versed in that topic) I’ve extended that to climate science. I’ve given examples and explanations of what kind of data is available to make conclusions about, and I’ve even pointed out conclusions that I don’t think we can make yet – like the anthropogenic hypothesis.

If you don’t like me being careful about what I say, then don’t ask me about politically-charged topics that I haven’t studied in detail.

You said “Just as creationism and “creation science” were ruled by the US Supreme Court to be religion in 1987 and therefore forbidden to be presented in public schools, in 2005 intelligent design creationism was similarly ruled to be not science but religion. Intelligent design creationism has no theory, no hypotheses and is not testable – it is simply not science, unless you dumb down science to include astrology and other pseudo-sciences, as was famously explained by a Dishonesty Institute Fellow in the Dover Trial.”

You appear to think because SCOTUS has said so, that makes a thing unassailable. When did we start thinking that way? What can possibly delude whole generations of Americans, inheritors of the greatest freedoms yet known to man, to think nine men in robes are so perfect and incorruptible we can safely leave to them every question respecting our freedoms? The prudent man guards his freedoms jealously, is never so rash as to trust them to others, and when rogue justices violate a freedom is quick to react. I’d sooner trust such others with a huge stash of untraceable money than my freedoms.

Atheism is subject to precisely the same criticism as creationism. It has no greater foundation of proof than does Intelligent Design and is no more science than is creationism. Yet, our courts fail to place a similar ban on teaching the credo of atheism within our public schools. It is not the place of courts to determine what shall or shall not be taught in our schools or what we can or should teach our own children. That was and is judicial activism and theosophical partisanship of the worst kind; the very sort our 1st Amendment is supposed to prevent. Were the courts favoring creationism and banning atheism, I have no doubt you would be arguing the irrationality and perfidy of the courts.

Intelligent Design does not pretend to be a complete story of creation. It is merely a fresh approach attempting to synthesize the best of ideas from both sides of the evolution-creationism chasm. As such, it should not be lumped in with either creationism or atheism. Its adherents hope to get beyond the tit-for-tat animosity so much in vogue. Even if you don’t agree with the premise, I’d think you’d at least welcome the attempt at open-dialogue between people of faith & science and those of ‘pure’ science. Instead, you lump ID with creationism and smugly denounce both as superstition while ignoring your own ‘unscientific’ assumptions. I find the ID proposition intriguing, if not entirely persuasive; and believe it deserves a place in the overall debate.

How can I say atheism is not science? Atheism is no more than an antithetical proposition to creationism based on the same available evidence as is available to those of us who appreciate the accomplishments of science without rashly denying substantial evidence for the existence of a creator. That makes atheism somewhat unscientific in that it categorically excludes some types of evidence while relying on remaining evidence to jump to a forgone conclusion which, itself, does not stand any test of proof. The basis for this exclusion is an assumption that: if a thing cannot be absolutely proved, then it has no substance and can be safely discarded as superstition. When evolution was first proposed (Darwinism), it assumed some things that turned out untrue. By comparison with today’s evolutionary theory, Darwinism would be regarded superstition. Atheists, nonetheless, took Darwinism for gospel. Today, evolutionary theory has evolved, yet atheist make no acknowledgment of the shifting position on this and other unproven unscientific postulates. A great deal of atheistically ‘sound’ science thus starts from immature assumptions, some of which cannot be proved ever. They are impervious to proof because they are fundamental assumptions not accessible to proof other than by reference to themselves (circular). Thus, atheism, too, is ultimately an article of faith, one that denies the existence of G*d sans perfect proof; yet accepting as perfect proof assumptions dependent on imperfect evidence. You, thus, have to dumb down science every bit as much to reach the atheist conclusion of the ultimate reality as you say creationism and ID do.

The atheist-religion has become every bit as smugly intolerant of contrarian views as the Judaic and Christian religions once were, and claim an absolute monopoly over what is now taught our children. Rather than being the force for freedom of conscience and free-thinking, it has become an entrenched and intolerant ideology. As a Jew, I respect and tolerate differences and dissonances between my religion and that of various Christians, Buddhists, Taoists, Intelligent Design theorists, &c. I even respect and tolerate atheists, and recognize your right to your opinion (though I do see in it some dangerous tendencies). Can atheists who assert religion has no place in our schools, laws, judiciary and public forums honestly say the same?

*** This is one of the reasons I refuse to continue a dishonest debate. Here’s what I actually said about the issue:

“But knowing this, we can still somehow tell that the world’s temperature will be significantly warmer in 2100 than it is today (even though we can’t predict the weather for Chicago more than a few hours in advance)? 18 [Footnote 18] No, I’m not mixing apples and oranges by talking about tomorrow’s weather and global warming predictions. Nor am I taking a cheap shot at the global-warmers as a substitute for addressing objective facts. Have a glance at a question submitted to NASA’S Goddard Space Flight Center “Ask an Astrophysicist” on February 18, 1998 (http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/980218c.html) ‘Mars will definitely become more comfortable (Of course that is a relative term, for me comfortable is about 20 degrees F, with snow falling at a rate of 12 inches per hour) but it will be warmer. To actually guess as actual conditions is pretty tough since predicting the exact weather 1 week in advance is still pretty hard here on earth where we have a lot of information’.”

This was a comment about prediction, using a related subject like weather to illustrate the point I was making. It followed the other weather/climate prediction comparisons I made:

As Andrew Kenny wrote in The Sunday Mail on July 14, 2002, “Environmentalists claim that world temperatures have risen one degree Fahrenheit in the past century, but [Piers Corbyn, Director of Weather Action] points out that the period they take as their starting point — around 1880 — was colder than average. What’s more, the timing of temperature changes does not appear to support the theory of global warming. Most of the rise came before 1940 — before human-caused emissions of ‘greenhouse’ gases became significant.”

“The paucity of weather recording stations around the world in 1900 would give us, at best, a rough estimate of the world’s actual temperature … To say that the world has “gotten warmer by one degree over the last 100 years” is to pretend that the figures of 1906 are just as accurate as those collected in 2006. Lest anyone think that this little problem was rendered moot by the 1920s, 1930’s, or even the 1940’s, Eisenhower couldn’t get his chief meteorologist to say whether it was going to rain or be dry on Normandy beach just across the English Channel on June 6, 1944, let alone tell him what the temperature was that day in the middle of the Amazon jungle. It wasn’t until the advent of the space age that mankind truly began to get a handle on predicting the weather — and was finally able to come up with a “global average temperature” accurate to a hundredth of a degree as it is today. And yet, we “know” that the world has gotten one degree warmer over the last 100 years because we can compare a digital readout taken today to the number we find in the back of some dusty old book?”

Climate and weather are different issues. But they are related. If you can’t even predict rainfall/temperatures a week out, how can you tell us with certainty what the earth’s temperature (which is impacted by weather patterns) is 75-100 years from now?

All this is just an elaborate dodge by Raymond anyway. Even though we’re both essentially in agreement on the issue, it took half a dozen comment exchanges to get a straightforward answer to the only question I posed in my original comment: “I don’t think I ever asked your opinion about the ‘existence’ of man-made-global warming. Do you apply the same standards of critical thought to that analysis as well (i.e. generations of human observations are required to draw any meaningful conclusions)?”

If anyone wants to read what I actually wrote about the way politics and hidden agendas shape the global warming debate, please have a look at http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2006/07/31/an-even-more-inconvenient-truth-the-myth-of-man-made-global-warming/ I lay out my assumptions and methodology in a straightforward way. You can decide for yourself whether what I’ve said makes any sense (with or without the benefit of CS Lewis).

If you want a straightforward answer to the question I asked Raymond, feel free to comb through all that he’s said here and see if you can figure it out. It’s not my intention to hijack this thread with a detailed discussion of the man-made global warming hoax. Anyone who wants to see what I think about that can read my article (including footnotes and sources).

All I wanted was a straightforward answer to a question about scientific standards, which seems beyond the desire, or ability, of Raymond to answer with an equally straightforward reply; relying instead on an extended discussion of what constitutes a “precise”, “accurate” or “meaningful statement”.

It’s time we forced science to differentiate between the meaningful statements it wants to accept, and the accurate measurements and conclusions it can actually support.

Now, the smaller portion where you address the instrumental record – what we’re discussing here – is interesting, but doesn’t do much to tackle it quantitatively. For example, you note “Using this equipment [common circa 1900], how one would recognize the difference between 87, 87.13, 87.25, and 87.39 degrees (or anything in between) is somewhat of a mystery. If the actual temperature was, say, 87.46 degrees, but the observer mistakenly recorded it (or simply rounded it off to) 87 degrees…”

However, elsewhere in the same article you note that accuracy to within 1/100 of a degree was technically feasible. (Saying that the thermometer’s precision “might have approached the limit of ± 0.01° C” is not the same as saying “we couldn’t figure out what the temperature was”, BTW.) Precision to around a tenth of a degree – one full order of magnitude less precise – was quite possible, and indeed necessary for much chemistry, as I noted before. (You don’t need “highly sophisticated digital measuring devices” to get accurate and precise measurements – look at surveying equipment. We’d still commonly use mercury thermometers today if less toxic but adequate substitutes weren’t available.)

So, you’re quite right that we can’t be sure that the temperature was 87.13, 87.25, or 87.39. However, such actual temperatures would have been recorded as 87.1, (87.2 or 87.3), and 87.4. If you go look up the records, you’ll note that they are indeed given to the nearest tenth of a degree. 87.5 is not the same thing as ‘somewhere between 65 and 102′. In short, no, it could not “be off by any number of degrees”.

Then there’s the problem of the “lack of a genuine, in-depth, worldwide data collection system” – a definite issue, but no more insurmountable than the problem of precisely measuring temperatures. Since we are looking for averages, ‘noise’ in the data is not an insurmountable barrier to pinning down a range of values with a probability distribution – in a quantifiable way. You claim that we would have “at best, a rough estimate of the world’s actual temperature” – but can you tell me how rough? What are the error bars, anyway, and why?

I note that a lot of the article engages in what C.S. Lewis called Bulverism; as he put it, “You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong.” I’m perfectly willing to stipulate that a lot of people pushing global warming have personal motivations for doing so, but that game can be played both ways – so too do a lot of so-called “global warming deniers”. The real questions are, “Is the Earth warming?”, and “If so, why?”. Once those are dealt with, then motivations might be relevant.

You actually do work on those questions at the end, but you make a mistake on the first one – I missed where you established that the 0.01 degree precision you desire is actually the “minimal level of accuracy” (well, technically, precision) necessary to identify a trend. How did you identify this value of precision as the “minimal level”? Why, to pick a random example, would precision within 0.2 degrees be unacceptable?

(I’ll note in passing that you appear to confuse “weather” with “climate” – predicting the exact value of a noisy signal is an entirely different proposition from predicting the expected value and the probable error range. Think about predicting stocks, if that analogy helps. Picking exactly when a stock has peaked is nigh-impossible; predicting within a useful range how likely it is to go up or down from where it is… that’s much more feasible, though not generally trivial.)